Most of writing starts out as an email to friends, colleagues, or to private mailing lists. Future iterations often become columns for Messaging News or academic articles. Unfortunately, far too often, I don’t publish what I write publicly. This blog is the result of my friends encouraging me to make more of my writing public. Please excuse the dust while I set everything up and start to publish some of my backlog. ...
The Apple iPad does an excellent job of displaying most web sites. However, there are a few obstacles you may want to avoid. There are also a few customizations that will make your site look even better on the iPad. I will summarize the most important issues you should start to plan for and the differences between the iPad browser, the iPhone browser, and desktop browsers. As an added benefit, most improvements made for the iPad will also benefit users with an iPhone or an iPod Touch. There is list of resources to find more information and a list of tools to help you test your site at the end of the article. ...
Recent versions of desktop Web browsers and email clients feature phishing and malware protection in addition to improved security notifications and indicators. Unfortunately, many of these improvements have not reached their mobile device counterparts. While the patterns of use and the threat model for Web browsing and email on mobile devices differ from desktop applications, as smartphones become more capable they present an increasingly attractive target. Institutions and services that wish to protect their mobile user base should seriously consider server-based filtering for both email and Web content on mobile devices. Currently, it is difficult–to nearly impossible–to verify the authenticity of email messages and the destination of hyperlinks on many common smartphones. ...
Why I like Markdown I format my articles using Markdown, a lightweight syntax designed to emulate the simple markup style commonly used in email messages. For example, if you would like to make text bold, just put asterisks around it. If you would like to make a list, just put a dash in front of each item. Overall, I’m happy with the change, as it has simplified the process for me to publish online. I can write with any text editor or word processor and then Markdown will convert my text to nicely formatted HTML. ...
Character set encoding Character encoding is the low-level representation of the letters, numbers, and symbols we see in our daily interactions with computers. Common encodings for documents in English are ISO-8859-1 (a superset of ASCII), UTF-8 (an 8 bit Unicode character encoding), and Windows-1252. There are a great number of character set encodings in use and a long and complicated history of how they came to be. This complexity often leads to problems. Typically, these problems are caused when the document is encoded with one encoding, but is interpreted as another. ...
Social network analysis is the study of connections, flows, and structure among people, groups, organizations, and systems. The points or nodes in the network may include people, routers, or even disease vectors. The ability to analyze communication patterns and social networks has become a major component of eDiscovery systems. Packages from Autonomy’s Zantaz, Cataphora, and Seagate’s i365 MetaLINCS all feature social network analysis functionality. Research, development, and experimentation in social network analysis tools are likely to make significant contributions to commercial eDiscovery systems in the future. Community, communication and collaboration services, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, and MySpace, are now commonly used in conjunction with institutional systems. These external services are not yet commonly integrated with most compliance and archiving systems. In this article I discuss the NodeXL and Maltego applications. Both of these tools offer a specialized feature set that could offer insight into future development for eDiscovery platforms in terms of external data and analysis of social networks. ...
The web-based interfaces offered by the shipping services allow you to schedule shipments, manage billing, store addresses, and track packages online. Some third-party services offer simplified interfaces and allow you to track shipments from multiple shipping carriers at once. Still, the process of entering multiple tracking numbers into multiple services can be cumbersome. I prefer the email-based input method used by the TrackMyShipments service. TrackMyShipments is an email-based online package tracking service I used for more than year and half to as a streamlined method to track packages. TrackMyShipments takes advantage of the fact that you already have the tracking numbers sent to you in email. I wrote about another email based interface in my review of how TripIt Shows the Value of Combining Email, Web and APIs. The signup process is very quick. After registration, you simply forward an email messages with tracking numbers to track@trackmyshipments.com and the service will send you a notification when the shipping status of you package changes. ...
What we think is reasonable, commonplace, or even possible in terms of protecting or violating online privacy shifts constantly. Recent developments in tools and techniques for tracking online behavior and identifying individuals from supposedly anonymized data sets should cause us to reevaluate what is possible. Katherine McKinley of iSEC Partners published a detailed analysis of how popular browsers and browser extensions handle cookies and other methods of local data storage used for tracking users in her December, 2008 paper Cleaning Up after Cookies (PDF). McKinley tested the ability for browsers and extensions to clear the private data as well as “private browsing” features. She found that most browsers attempted to clear previous stored private data, but often left some data accessible. She found that Adobe Flash did not attempt to remove this data and in fact stored it in such a way that it circumvented most privacy protections offered by browsers. iSEC Partners created an online version of the test used in the article to allow individuals to test their own configurations. It is available at Breadcrumbs Tracker. ...
For the Internet connected population, the problems of access to information have long shifted from limited availability of information to problems of narrowing down the flood of relevant information to a manageable amount. Filters have become increasingly sophisticated, but timely, relevant, and unobtrusive display notifications for the information we want are still a work in progress. This article explores recent developments in notifications for desktop clients, mobile phones, and Web applications. Notifications range from the mundane “Your backup is finished” or “Someone just responded to your column online” to the important “Your flight is delayed and has a new gate” to the urgent “A large out of state jewelry purchase just appeared on your credit card” or “Your corporate mail server and primary database are offline.” Many of these recent developments are very much in the experimental stage, but are clearly leading to important changes in how we receive information. For those willing to tinker a bit, the new capabilities are impressive. ...
Validating data in web forms reduces the likelihood of inadvertent submission of data that is incorrectly formatted, inconsistent, or incomplete. It is often useful to validate email addresses, especially if the addresses are going to be used for receipts or other types of follow up. Validation (and basic bounds checking) can also reduce the chance that email address field could be used as an attack vector. It is important to note that email addresses can be significantly more complicated than commonly thought. This means that it is important to consult the most current RFCs for email standards and ICANN announcements for new types of Top Level Domain names otherwise valid email addresses may be blocked. For example, the plus character is a valid within the local portion of an email address. The plus is typically used as an optional feature for sub-addressing and is supported in many mail servers, Cyrus IMAP installations, and in Gmail. However, the plus sign is frequently rejected as invalid by many web forms. ...